Monthly Archives: December, 2014

Over the weekend United Airlines inaugurated a new weekly nonstop flight from San José, Costa Rica, to George Bush International Airport in Houston, Texas, in the United States. It is the carrier’s fifth weekly flight on the route and operates four days a week, from Friday to Monday, departing at 1:45 a.m.

Potential property owners are likely quite familiar with property taxes. However, a relatively newer tax has hit the real estate market that you should keep in mind should you consider purchasing property in Costa Rica. It’s called the Impuesto Solidario para el Fortalecimiento de Programas de Vivienda (roughly translated as the Solidarity Tax for the Strengthening of Housing Programs)

In downtown San José, just west of the Cementerio de Obreros, sits a forgettable lot of urban real estate where the municipality and the Public Works and Transport Ministry park garbage trucks and heavy equipment. But on this same spot 73 years ago, an internment camp was erected by the government to hold hundreds of German-Costa Rican prisoners after the United States and Costa Rica entered World War II in December 1941.

My first winter here implied a very steep learning curve. If there are any readers out there who have not lived through January or February beyond, say, the 35th parallel, please beware: Winter is kind of evil.

WASHINGTON, D. C. – Cristina Equizábal, a senior fellow at El Salvador’s National Foundation for Development (FUNDE), visited Costa Rica earlier this month – and was shocked to learn that local police had uncovered an enormous cache of M-16s, Uzis, AK-47s and other weapons in a suburb of San José.

WASHINGTON, D. C. – A strong U.S. economy and lower world oil prices will only mean good news for Central America next year, predicts the World Bank official directly responsible for the six-country region.

This year, William Shakespeare turned 450 years old. To celebrate, Lugiérnaga Producciones is offering a course on how to perform Elizabethan monologues.

The Senate report shows that Redha al-Najar was tortured by the CIA for nearly 700 days. He was subjected to isolation in total darkness, sound disorientation techniques, sense of time deprivation, limited light, cold temperatures, sleep deprivation, blaring loud music for 24 hours a day, bad food, and humiliation and degradation such as being made to wear a diaper and having no access to toilet facilities, hooding and shackling.

Negotiators faced more months of hard bargaining on a proposed global climate treaty after talks in Lima, Peru, yielded a new pledge to battle global warming but few specifics on how the fight will be waged.

Costa Rican Ronald Araya on Sunday won the first leg of the Vuelta Ciclísta a Costa Rica, a multi-day cycling race that began with a course from the capital San José to the Caribbean port of Limón.